I give you permission to revamp romantic thinking...
With yourself, with him, with her, with them...
When you receive this post, Valentine’s Day will be in the rear view mirror which could be a relief to some. That used to be me. I was either never getting my expectations met, or convinced I should denounce Valentine’s Day all together because it was a Hallmark sham. I had a turn around a few years back and wrote about it in my LA Times piece From the Heart; a jaded soul I was dating had an exceptional reaction to a Valentine’s Day card I sent in the mail. I had decided no matter what my past experiences, it was time to put love front and center, and why not enjoy the one day earmarked on the calendar for its expression.
When I did this turn around in thinking, I gradually embraced how awesome Valentine’s Day was, and couldn’t wait to meet someone who could be as wildly excited to be in love as I was. That happened last year. My boyfriend is an amazing man who has been celebrating Valentine’s Day since last week with me. Here is the best part, we don’t need Valentine’s Day to be romantic. We are all the time, but in knowing the honoring of this day healed a long dark wound in my heart, he went for it. Talk about love heals.
We all want to be healed. None of us want to walk around with Cupid’s Arrow in our heart. Loving the wrong people, at the wrong time, for the wrong reasons can cause suffering. Or loving people and then changing and needing new love is painful too. Being left behind is hard but doing the leaving is equally challenging. As we grow and evolve, we deepen our relationship with romantic love and take more risks to love. The capacity in which I love in my romantic relationship today is like the master’s program of partnership, where in the past, I was in an old model, shrouded by fears still in play from childhood.
What are the models today of your romantic thoughts? Are they fresh and new and in accordance with who you are today, the amount of money you make, the friends you have, how much you smile, how sexy you feel, where you live? Or are they in a tangle of the dalliances of the past or your parents’ past? We can shape our romantic ideals by what we think we deserve, without realizing we have done a heap load of work and we get to revamp the model. We can go for having all we want, asking for it, and doing so from a place that says we are authentic and new.
Up-leveling romantic love isn’t always easy. We hit walls and find our insecurities. No matter what kind of relationship you are in, each day you wake up and know and love yourself, and all you are creating in your life, you get to learn how to spread some of that goodness into the person whose hand you can’t wait to hold. To snuggle at night and in the morning. To laugh over what would be nothing to outsiders but to the two of you, it is comedy gold. To listen to them talk about their pain and their past and not believe it has anything to do with the love you two share except for the delicacy of its intimacy within.
You have to know you are worthy of love and so many women get the money, the fame, the independence, the personal power, but they struggle to be in a “we” with someone who they can learn from and who they can teach. Romantic love is reciprocity. Soul mates are there to teach us what we are next level ready to learn. To blow our minds with their capacity to see into us and to find what they see laced with the greatest desire.
I give you permission to find that wild love. To tear down all the protective devices you use, and stop manipulating situations that prove over and over love isn’t real. Love is real. Love heals. And I wish for every person on this planet, to be romantically loved, at least once in their lifetime in the way that their heart beats for.
I would love to know your experiences with romantic love! What walls can you break down?